Texan Carefully Driving McCain’s Money Machine

“Hiya, I’m the lady from the McCain campaign,” says Carla Eudy, the spine of the Arizona Republican’s anti-money money machine.

She adjusts her phone headset, worn relentlessly like a second pair of ears.

“Oooh, I’d love to go to lunch with you,” she sweet-talks an older man, a former Navy undersecretary.

Her Texas drawl is flat but friendly, always no-nonsense.

This is call No. 22 on a bleak January morning. She’s already briefed her staff, scrutinized what cash came in overnight, taken an aspirin for a sinus headache.

Now she’s listening, typing, sipping from a 7-Eleven super cup and tapping her pen on a printout of names.

“We think we’ll have lots of momentum after New Hampshire.”

She’s through the bid and the ask. Now for the close:

“You’ll help? Oh, GREAAAAT.”

Click. He didn’t, though. Still, Eudy, a fierce competitor, is unfazed.

Raising money for a guy who went to every burg in New Hampshire last year preaching the evils of campaign fund-raising is a lot like cooking dinner for a vegetarian on a cattle ranch.

Certainly John McCain has acknowledged that he’s tiptoeing atop a razor blade when he puts his hand out to people who give him campaign contributions.

“Don’t do anything that would be viewed as shady or open to question--because we’d get killed,” McCain says he told Eudy when he hired the Republican fund-raiser to run his Clean-Money Campaign.

He didn’t have to tell her that. She’s 40, canny, experienced. Still, neither she nor McCain is willing to admit that there might be a paradox when the anti-money man puts himself in the hands of one of the best professionals in a business he publicly deplores.

“Listen, you can’t turn on the microphones to announce you’re running without money,” he said in a recent interview. “We’re all tainted by it. But that’s the reality.”

McCain’s money machine is probably the worst example of presidential fund-raising in the fast lane: He raised only $14 million in 1999--so much less than George W. Bush’s record-breaking $67 million that Eudy bursts out laughing when she talks about it.

Yet his operation may be the best example of how running for president often comes down to the interplay between love and money. After winning big in the New Hampshire primary, McCain is awash in love, and Eudy says she and her small staff are poised to take it to the bank.

For more than anything else, a fund-raiser’s job is to leverage the love--for the candidate, access, the donor’s ego, the fund-raiser--into money. Generating love for himself and his message is McCain’s task; appealing to that and the other loves is Eudy’s. She’ll work with what she’s got.

No matter who the candidate is, professional fund-raisers all plunge into donors’ pockets much the same way. Even more than debates and speeches and bus tours, this is the real work, the invisible activity of the race for the nomination.

Early on, when McCain was low on love--3% in polls with a 5% margin of error, he likes to joke--his fund-raisers struggled. With 200,000-piece mailings, Eudy prospected for $1,000 contributions from people who had never before given to McCain.

Much of the first $2 million dribbled in from the usual sources--Washington lobbyists who understand how a powerful senator like McCain, who heads the Commerce Committee, can affect their businesses. Small donors also came through, particularly veterans with an extra $25 for the hero who nearly died in a POW camp in Vietnam.

It didn’t help morale early on when the Republican Party’s finance chairman said Bush’s fund-raising behemoth was “sucking the wind out of everybody’s sails.” As if on cue, some underfunded GOP candidates began calling it quits.

“Carla went off the deep end,” recalls McCain campaign spokesman Dan Schnur, giggling.

Small, short and compact, Eudy stands out among McCain’s dressed-down, youthful staff at his headquarters in this Washington suburb. She’s the one in a boucle suit and sensible, fine-leather shoes who is comfortable sitting next to Oscar de la Renta at a small McCain dinner hosted by Henry A. Kissinger. She’s given blood to a presidential longshot before.

But after McCain moved up in the polls and his face started appearing on the cover of newsmagazines--giving Eudy more to work with--the dollars started pouring in: $6.2 million from October through December.

“All the work we had done at the beginning of the year--the few people in a room, the phone calls and callbacks--paid off at the end of the year,” Eudy says.

And her post-New Hampshire planning started long before New Hampshire. “We’ve been preparing for a win since December,” she said Thursday.

The campaign planned to hold two high-roller fund-raising events this weekend in California and four more later in the month. On Thursday, McCain will participate in a first-ever cyber fund-raiser--a live event on the campaign’s Web site--and a chat via satellite to supporters at 15 events throughout Arizona.

In the meantime, Eudy’s team is directing volunteers at phone banks in three cities, blasting e-mails to 50,000 potential donors and sending overnight letters to another 240,000.

Within 48 hours of McCain’s New Hampshire victory, the campaign reaped more than $1 million in Internet contributions. To those who say McCain can’t possibly catch up to Bush’s bank account, Eudy says: “We don’t have to match Bush dollar for dollar. We just need for John McCain to be a competitor.”

But even that takes a lot of money. Eudy estimates that her candidate needs $4 million to get his message out before the California primary March 7.

“I’m not saying this will be easy, but don’t underestimate John McCain,” she says.

The public, soured by years of fund-raising scandals, may think that raising campaign money is all about peddling access or squirting cash at the political parties. But there are other components, especially hard work and organization.

And when the candidate is an underdog, fund-raising can be like asking for a first date over and over again. People like Eudy have refined the art of getting rich donors to gather their friends in a room with the fine-tuned ambience needed to separate people from their money: plenty of food, lubricants at the bar and the candidate giving the pitch, getting the laughs.

(McCain’s standard opener: “I have good news and bad news. The good news is we have enough money to fund the rest of the campaign. The bad news is some of that money is still in your wallets and purses.”)

Eudy is the steely manager who must ensure that the checks get written. And political fund-raising is not done in the understated way of private schools and Protestant churches.

Take a recent McCain fund-raiser in Greenwich, Conn. Two hundred guests rattled around the mansion of an HBO executive. Three fireplaces were working on the first floor. Amid the opulence, Eudy’s deputy stood at the door, greeting people, writing name tags and asking, “Did you bring your check?” “Could you write a check now?” “Your check, please?”

Donors who ponied up $1,000 were rewarded--with a copy of McCain’s autobiography.

Eudy prides herself on keeping tight control of the details. Before an event, she reviews everything from the number of tables sold to what’s on the menu: beef or chicken?

By all logic, Eudy should have spent 1999 in Texas working for George W., the bear who tipped over a honey pot. She’s a Texan; she thinks big; she loves money. Certainly, many of the Republican friends she’s made from 15 years in the fund-raising business are there.

But Eudy went with McCain because they’re friends, demonstrating that while paid fund-raisers aren’t always ideological, you wouldn’t catch many of them selling soap at Procter & Gamble.

“I see myself as a genuine person who is working for a man I genuinely believe in,” she says, adding, “I could never raise money for a Democrat.”

Eudy met McCain when she was finance director of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, chaired by her mentor, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas. Gramm and Eudy took a committee $7 million in debt and turned it into a money factory for candidates who flipped the Senate Republican in 1994. Eudy also worked with McCain on Gramm’s failed 1996 presidential bid.

In 1997, McCain called Eudy on his own behalf. The senator was up for reelection, and between 1992 and 1997 he’d raised a laughable $2,000. Eudy found him $1 million in new national support and raised $4 million overall.

While the candidate and the fund-raiser worked well together--”they clicked,” says an aide--she never tired of telling him that she’d never, ever, give her life over to another presidential campaign. She had just opened a fund-raising firm on Capitol Hill and was doing very well working for GOP senators and nonprofits that were close to her heart.

Eudy was vacationing in St. Martin in the Caribbean over Thanksgiving in 1998 when McCain called again: He needed her. He knew the conventional wisdom: You need $20 million to even stand a chance of reaching the White House.

McCain says he hired Eudy, whom he affectionately calls “The Old Witch,” because she is a friend with a “very winning personality, and that’s a critical part of being a fund-raiser: to get people to like you.”

Like McCain, Eudy has a streak of maverick in her, a bloodless determination that allows her to believe she should be in charge. Although you’d never know it to hear her “I’m-just-a-nice-girl-from-Texas” style on the phone, she clearly relishes that her eight-person shop is up against Bush’s apparatus, which has four times as many people.

She stiffens a little when asked about McCain’s vow, controversial among Republicans, never to take soft money--the largely unregulated contributions to the parties that give corporations, unions and wealthy individuals unparalleled access to elected officials and bureaucrats--and his co-sponsorship of Senate legislation that would ban it.

“I’m getting there,” she says. “You have to be true to your convictions, and that’s John McCain all the way.”

Soon after McCain hired Eudy, Deb Gullett, his longtime aide and Arizona fund-raiser, flew to Washington to help her work up a financial plan.

“In an hour and a half, Carla noodled it out,” says Gullett, describing watching Eudy write an industrial-strength marketing plan. For starters, they rolled over $2 million from his Senate campaign fund.

Then the daily dialing for dollars began. A key hurdle was getting McCain tooled up. The man who was beaten senseless in a POW camp has a low pain threshold for asking for money. Oh, he does it. But not with any enthusiasm.

Every lunchtime from January to April, McCain trudged over to Eudy’s office to make calls. Sometimes she had to give him a shove.

“Most staffers are deferential to the candidate, but not Carla,” Schnur says. “There’s an undertone of affection, but she is always in the boss’ face.”

Truth is, they’re a tag team. When McCain talked to a donor for 25 minutes and forgot to ask for the cash, it would fall to Eudy to call back and do the dirty work. And when potential donors were out to lunch, McCain would leave a message saying, “Oh rats, I missed you. Could you call back Carla Eudy?” Then she’d take the return call and say, “Oh rats, you just missed the senator, but could you send $1,000?”

(Judging from his recent television interviews, McCain has come a long way: In every other sentence, he mentioned his need for money or his Web site address.)

A lot of Eudy’s energy has been spent recruiting rich volunteers, business executives who have a lot of rich friends.

In September, shortly after Herbert M. Allison Jr. stepped down as president of Merrill Lynch & Co., he heard from McCain advisors Kenneth M. Duberstein, the Washington lobbyist and former Ronald Reagan aide, and Sen. Charles Hagel of Nebraska. The campaign asked Allison to sign on as McCain’s finance chairman, and, after a brief meeting with the candidate in a New York hotel lobby, Allison agreed.

“As much as I love Carla,” says McCain, the campaign also needed Allison and his high-level, big-money contacts.

Eudy checks in with Allison several times daily, and was excited to hear one afternoon that he had made 70 calls that day. Eudy and campaign manager Rick Davis have weekly conference calls with members of the finance committee. Sometimes McCain gets on the line, but more typically Davis talks strategy and Eudy talks money.

“These are extremely resourceful, high-integrity people who are indefatigable,” Allison says of Eudy and Davis. “I’d put them up against anybody on Wall Street.”

Eudy says she could see herself working on Wall Street. But when she hears that a Texas friend, a Bush finance co-chair, suggests that like all good Texans she’ll “come home” when McCain fails, Eudy laughs. Is she ready to concede?

“Hell, no,” she says. “Just you watch: We’re gonna win.”